“Gid Ward has always backed everybody off the trail into the bushes round here” said Seth. “But he's up against a different crowd now.” “Do ye think, in the first place, that Colonel Gid is going to sell 'em any right o' way across Poquette?” asked the postmaster. “He owns the whole tract there.” “Oh, there's ways of getting it,” replied Seth. “Let lawyers alone for that when they're paid. If Gid don't sell, they can condemn and take.” In a week a portion of Seth's prediction concerning lawyers was verified. Mr. Bevan, tall and thin and sallow, stepped off the train at Sunkhaze. He was a prominent attorney in one of the principal cities of the state, and served as clerk of this new corporation. When he heard that Col. Gideon Ward was fifty miles up the West Branch, looking after a timber operation on Number 8, Range 23, he borrowed leggings, shoe-pacs and an overcoat and hastened on by means of a tote-team. A week later, silent and grim and pinched with cold, he unrolled himself from buffalo-robes and took the train at Sunkhaze. The postmaster and station-agent gave him several opportunities to relate the outcome of his negotiations, but the attorney was taciturn. The first news came down two week later by Miles McCormick, a swamper on Ward's Number 8 operation. The man had a gash on his cheek and a big purple swelling under one eye. When a man of Ward's crew came down from the woods marked in that manner, it was not necessary for him to say that he had been discharged by the choleric tyrant who ruled the forest forces from Chamberlain to Seguntiway. The only inquiry was as to method and provocation. “He comes along to me as I was choppin',” related Miles to the Sunkhaze postmaster, “and he yowls, 'Git to goin' there, man, git to goin'!' 'An',' says I, 'sure, an' I'll not yank the ax back till it's done cuttin'.' An' then he” Miles put his finger carefully against the puffiness under his eye, “he hit me.” “Was there a tall stranger come up on the tote-team two weeks or so ago?” asked the postmaster. “There were,” Miles replied, listlessly, and intent on his own troubles. “Hear anything special about his business?” “No. The old man took the stranger into the wangun camp, where it was private, and they talked. None of us heard 'em.” “And then the stranger went away, hey?” “Oh, well, at last we heard the old man howlin' and yowlin' in the wangun camp and then he comes a-pushing the tall stranger out with such awful language as you know he can. An' he says to the stranger, 'Talk about charters and condemning land till ye're black in the face, I say ye can't do it; and every rail ye lay I'll tie it into a bow-knot. An' I'll eat your charter, seals and all. An' I'll throw your engine into the lake. An' how do ye like the smell of those?' When he said it he cracked his old fists under the stranger's nose. An' the stranger gets into the team and goes away. So that's all of it, and none of us knowed what it meant at all.”